Vlingo Gets $20M and Exclusive Yahoo Deal

Speech recognition company Vligno has scored a $20 million second round of funding led by Yahoo, and through a relationship with the search company, access to 600 million cell phone subscribers worldwide. As I noted earlier, Yahoo said today it will use Vlingo to power the voice recognition for its oneSearch mobile search product.

“We like the technology so much we made sure our competitors can’t use it,” explained Marco Boerries, president of Yahoo Mobile. Boerries declined to say how much Yahoo put into Vlingo, but said the company had exclusive use of the technology for mobile search.

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Hooking its star to Yahoo puts Vlingo in the same league as Microsoft — which offers mobile carriers speech recognition technology derived from its TellMe acquisition — and singlespeech-focused search company Nuance Communications, which is cultivating carrier relationships as well.

The momentum in speech recognition is evident with the new relations between Yahoo and Vlingo.

The promise is a speech based search from your cellular handset. We are all aware that voice commands on cellular phones are not taking off. This is similar to computers. There the fact that you can do things quietly and using a full size qwerty keyboard, prevented the proliferation of speech based activity. I do not know when was the last time you tried a speech based search solution. To read more… goto http://speechanalytics.blogspot.com/2008/04/speech-based-search-is-aiming-high.html

FYI, Microsoft has its own speech recognition technology, which predates the TellMe acquisition. As a matter of fact, TellMe doesn’t have its own voice reco technology, per se. They have done a decent job of building a service on top of Nuance’s technology.

So, puting Nuance against Microsoft’s own voice recognition is more of apples to apples comaprison. You can see Microsoft’s own voice reco technology at work in the mobile Live Search app for Windows Mobile (according to news from CTIA, voice is being addded to the BlackBerry version, too).